


i've got you (under my skin)

by x (ordinary)



Category: Persona 4
Genre: Accomplice Ending, Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, F/M, Fem!Narukami Yu, Genderbending, Gunplay, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, Surreal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-21
Updated: 2015-07-21
Packaged: 2018-04-10 11:11:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4389560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ordinary/pseuds/x
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The news of Yu’s passing comes on a Tuesday.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i've got you (under my skin)

**Author's Note:**

> this verges on the surreal, so don't take every metaphor as fact or every fact at face value

The news of Yu’s passing comes on a Tuesday. 

\--

She'd left him once before. Left Inaba and all its fog behind, wrapped up in a lie that they’d birthed and buried together. The others had bid her farewell with fondness in their hearts and their cards in her hands, a full deck. Yu faded from their memories with affection and a smile, her visits stretched out longer and longer until they stopped entirely.

Five years gone and Adachi can still smell the smoke on his sleeves, feel the stretch of his grin, can sense the laugh caught in his throat before it erupts.

The burn of her eyes on him, watchful.

She'd loved and left them all, Adachi included. 

\--

Yu had been his accomplice. His  _partner,_ and she'd left on that train, abandoning him behind in the den of his creation. He had  _awakened_ here, caught sight of the vastness of the universe and bottled it in his palm. She'd gone but not before pulling on a thread that unraveled boundaries between their world and the other. The fog pushed at the seams until it spilled over, and Adachi watched its power grow, grinning all the while.

It seeped out of Inaba's cracked foundations and crept towards Tokyo, Seoul, and Hong Kong. It was a beast with its own pulse and directive: all Adachi had done was open the cage and let it free.

It left but he couldn't, cinderblocks around his feet. 

\--

 _Do you see?_  he asks, idly tapping the question to her at his desk, between paperwork he should be filing on missing persons. (Ones he'd had no direct hand in, this time.) Dutifully she responds:  _Of course. It's **our** world, after all._  

Adachi smiles and pockets his phone, a hunger flaring awake in his bones. The others still talk about Yu as if she were a goddess, but he knows better. She's the devil, fallen from grace.

\--

The days after her absence grow into weeks that grow into months. Their interactions skirt the edge of inappropriate, if interactions between a murderer and his accomplice could be appropriate to start. Texts that start out with dogged determination turn into habit, and she picks up on the second ring when anyone else goes to voicemail.

To have that kind of control, well.

Who could blame him?

Control has always been his thing, after all. 

\--

On a whimsy, to see what she'd do as much an appeal to the thirst he's yet to quench, Adachi teases the idea of starting again. Of resuming his unfinished business. With her gone, it'd be _easy_. With her gone, he could let that world consume the bitches that had tried to stop him--

It provokes a visit, out of season. She says she's made up an excuse for Dojima and a smile for Nanako, but the both of them are now in bed at home, and she's in Adachi's, now. Yu's fingers wind up in the lapels of his jacket, lifting him into the air without a blink. She's always had cold eyes and they're empty now, seeking an answer she know she won't find. Her face turns upwards to accommodate for the barrel of the gun that lovingly cradles her chin. This is their embrace. This is her, pushed up to the edge, teetering towards the yawning abyss.

He can hear his heart and hers, the roaring pulse of blood like a flooded river. All he can think is  _I'm so hungry_ , teeth bared, gun loaded, safety off.

This is what they are: push and pull, give and take. If she showed any more belly he'd consume her alive, glutted and sick from the poison of her flesh. But she's more like him than she lets on, dead from the inside out, rotting and old. It's beginning to show where her skin is the thinnest, the ichor leaks out at her wrists and eyes, and her hands are always cold.

"Ahhh," Adachi says, his tone conversational, his gun trained at her temple, even as her wrists find his neck. They've toppled to the ground, a heap of gangly limbs. "Can't you take a  _joke_ , Yu-chan? You should know by now that I wasn't serious."

"No, Adachi-san," she says, her fingers tightening and he'll need to find a scarf, his breath coming in quickened pants, "I cannot, and you were not." Yu turns her head and presses a kiss to the barrel as she chokes him with long, pale fingers, her thighs clamped down around his waist, strong and capable. 

He grins and bites at her mouth, unkind, and arches up to meet her.

\--

At night he dreams of clawed hands exploring the places between the ivory of her ribs, aching to touch the blackened organ that was her heart. His fingers graze against it, but never quite take hold.

\--

She stays a week and all Adachi wants to do is  _consume_  her, his wanderlust taken out on her, a punishment for leaving him here when she could have the world. She lets him, teeth sinking into the flesh of his neck, near the violet of her fingerprints, his pulse fluttering beneath and adrenaline riled. Yu knows how to get him off without even trying, her silver braids laid on her shoulders without a hair out of place, his wrist pressed to a sweat-slick forehead.

 His smile is cruel and the gun slides down between her breasts, caressing softer than his touch. His is not the only skin marked with bruises: she's a canvas waiting to be marked, and if none of them seem to stick, maybe it's just the feverish thing they have between them marring the memory of his acts. It gives Adachi the excuse to do it again and again, a knife along her hip and tie around her neck, blood spilling onto his sheets in rivulets.

\--

Watching the news is made all that much sweeter with the knowledge that Yu  _helped_  him do this, and willingly to boot. Hers was a betrayal concealed behind a tight-lipped smile. Hers was a betrayal behind empty, unsurprised eyes. Hers was a betrayal with a mouth full of worms and death on her tongue, bony fingers grasping at his own, too tight. 

\--

He picks up his phone, still balls deep inside her, because it's Dojima and it makes her squirm. She looks over her shoulder with a leer, bucking against him just-so. 

"Yes, Dojima-san?" Adachi asks, breathless, and his hips stutter to a stop, eyes wide. "No, Dojima-san, there must be some mistake-"

A swear and a dialtone and he puts the phone down, calloused fingers tightening around the curve of her unmarked hip.

The news of Yu’s passing comes on a Tuesday. She looks at him with yellow eyes, and he's starved. Fog filters in around the seals of his windows, seeping in from beneath the door. 

"Well, Adachi-san?" she asks, her voice echoing like rattling chains. "Aren't you going to finish what you've started?"

\--

Adachi goes to the funeral in the city, along with everyone else. He stands beside her in the crowd, and the fog's thicker than ever, heavy on his shoulders. The ghost of her touch rests at the small of his back, her head laid against his shoulder, smiling. Dojima reads the first eulogy, holding a wailing Nanako's hand, and it takes forever for all these sentimental fools to read their goodbyes. Half of Inaba must be here.

Looking down at her corpse, Adachi realizes it's his turn. He schools his face into controlled grief and speaks, emptiness pouring out of him to leave room for the tar in his lungs. But Yu beams at him brighter than ever, her fingers tipped with claws pressing against his spine, possessive.

"Thank you for coming, Adachi-san. It's nice to put old demons to rest, isn't it?" 

\--

He doesn't ask her what she is, but she tells him all the same.

"Something more," she says, golden eyes bright. "She was bound, but I am free." Yu holds out calloused palms for him to take, standing in front of her grave. "And we have work to do, don't we, Adachi-san?"

In her smile there's death, waiting just for him. Adachi embraces it with both hands and kisses her, and between her teeth is the taste of soil and the dust of ancients. He's home.

**Author's Note:**

> couldn't tell you why i preferred a f!yu for this, i guess i like thinking of her


End file.
